Employees hit $1 million Powerball win, split between 166 people

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Plant employees win million-dollar Powerball jackpot

166 coworkers who went in on the lottery ticket are sharing the winnings.

Employees at a Missouri company hit a $1 million Powerball prize after pooling their money together to buy tickets — but will each get just a few thousand dollars after they split the winnings between 166 people.

Peggy Lunsford, who works at U.S. Tool, which makes materials and tools used to manufacture aircraft, in Farmington, organized the group effort and collected $2 from coworkers who wanted to take a shot at winning the $300 million Powerball jackpot in December, FOX2 St. Louis reported Tuesday.

“Each department has a lead that gets together and gets their people’s money together. And then I helped [Lunsford] at the end with making sure the claim forms were filled out correctly, everybody’s driver’s license were filled out correctly,” Michelle Kemp, the company’s payroll supervisor, said. “Then we did take the ticket up to Jefferson City for everybody.”

Lunsford told FOX2: “I put our name on the back of it and phone numbers and stuck it under the mattress of my bed.”

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Lunsford found out they didn’t get the $300 million jackpot, but won the “Match 5” Powerball drawing on Christmas — a total of $1 million, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The employees’ ticket only needed one more matching number to get the big prize.

The 166 coworkers will still get a good bonus. Each person wins $6,024 before taxes, amounting to $4,277 in the end.

“It was pretty exciting the day [on Tuesday] that it got announced at work, it kind of, department-by-department, had been informed that they had won,” said Brent Williams, U.S. Tool’s vice president. “You could kind of hear the eruptions of celebration go around the plant.”